rn;
And whence is this sweet scent by Nature drawn,
Or heaven who deigns to grant it to such worth?
O, my dear violets, the hand which chose
You from all others, that has made you fair,
'Twas that adorned you with such charm and worth;
Sweet hand! which took my heart altho' it knows
Its lowliness, with that you may compare.
To that give thanks, and to none else on earth.

Thus we see that the Italians of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries were penetrated through and through by the modern
spirit--were, indeed, its pioneers. They recognized their own
individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms
of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as
counterparts to feeling and for her own sake.

Over all the literature we have been considering--whether poetic
comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of
pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or
of the finest details of scenery--there lies that bloom of the
modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define. The
rest of contemporary Europe had no such culture of heart and mind, no
such marked individuality, to shew.

The further growth of the Renaissance feeling, itself a rebirth of
Hellenic and Roman feeling, was long delayed.

Let us turn next to Spain and Portugal--the countries chiefly
affected by the great voyages of discovery, not only socially and
economically, but artistically--and see the effect of the new scenery
upon their imagination.

CHAPTER V

ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS
AND CATHOLIC MYSTICS

The great achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery of
the world within, of the whole deep contents of the human spirit.
Burckhart, praising this achievement, says:

If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly
poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding
centuries, we should have a mass of wonderful divinations and
single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would
seem to rival the poetry of the Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry
out of account, Godfrey of Strassburg gives us, in his _Tristram
and Isolt_, a representation of human passion, some features of
which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in the ocean
of artificial convention, and they are altogether something very
different from a complete obje